


The Bone Mother’s Grandchild

by QueenOfPlotTwists



Series: 31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [2]
Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Halloween Challenge, Minor Character Death, October Prompt Challenge, Russian Mythology, Russiand & Slavic Folklore AU, Yami Yuugi | Atem Has His Own Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:46:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26795335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfPlotTwists/pseuds/QueenOfPlotTwists
Summary: “We are almost to my house. I will out on some tea and then I will tell you all my secrets and those of my daughter, though I imagine she has told you more than you realize.”That was how, on his sixteenth birthday, Adrik “Yami” Yurlov came into the care of his grandmother Baba Yaga.OrAfter Yami's mother dies he finds himself in the scare of imperious and frightening grandmother--none other than the legendary Baba Yaga.Part 1: Prequel to the Walking House or How Yami came to become the new Infamous Baba YagaDay Two of 31 Day Y-G-October/Halloween Prompt ChallengePrompt 4: Buried
Series: 31 Day Yu-Gi-October Halloween Challenge [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947991
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	The Bone Mother’s Grandchild

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I know i skipped a day  
> Kuriboh siblings (scolding): The second Day.  
> Me: (glares at Kuribohs) I actually had this finished on Thursday and was going to edit it up and post it on friday after I finished the second act but work was chatoic  
> Kuribohs: and you spent the whole night watching youtube videos.  
> Me: (fiery death glare) ANYWAY...I'll be updating two today to make up for it, once i decided I could split this into three prompts and the objective is to write a little every day have fun and be creative so...enjoy!
> 
> Day 2 of 31-Day Y-g-October/Halloween Prompt challenge
> 
> Prompt 4: Buried

She’d been dead at least eight days before they let him cut her down to bury her.

He’s had to climb the tree and dig the whole himself, with his own hands and his own knife. The crows had pecked at her hanging corpse ravenously and were unwilling to give up their bounty, but he refused to be chased away. He’d scolded at them for desecrating the dead. They intern scorned and mocked him for forgetting their nature, and the order of the land: a corpse dead was not a body living, its only purpose was as food for the earth that had born it, nourished it, returning to the land what it had provided them in life.

Had she not taught him that?

She had, but he was too overcome with resolve to care and so he clawed at the ropes until her corpse dropped with a disgustingly wet thud. Dug her grave himself with his bare hands beneath the tree where they had hung her. Others might mock the irony, but he knew she would prefer it—this vacant tree that had been kind enough to end her life swiftly instead of some hypocritically claimed hollow ground, far away from the village and its people—and his father. Her corpse would never lay beside his coffin in the consecrated ground of the church cemetery and he knew she would prefer it that way.

Here was peaceful.

Here was wildness.

Here was freedom.

And once he’d placed his mother’s body in the ground in a cheap pine coffin and covered it with the warm embrace of mother earth, there at her grave he’d dropped to his knees, closed his eyes, opened his mouth and without knowing he was going to do it—he sang.

Sane as the flood of tears rained down his face.

Sang a song that was both young and ancient.

A song of hardship, and remembrance, and hope, and despair, and grief, and love.

Sang out the grief in his heart: long, harsh wail, sending his voice out into the void.

And when it was over, he sat there, alone and weeping and listened: listened for the voice in the voice, the presence that hides in the deep, dark places where magic dwells, hoping, begging, desperate for some form of comfort—some assurance that he’d brought her over into the next life, some confirmation that Svetlana Yurlov had made her crossing.

That she was free.

At first there was nothing—then he heard, not one but three distinct forms of music.

The first was the mob coming up from the village, too scared and unwilling to forget to even let him bury his mother in peace.

He heard them coming for him up the road, led by the same young priest of their false church that had condemned his mother. Witch, they’d called her, though he could not fathom as to why. Svetlana Yurlov never wore a witch’s shift. She never wore her unpinned her hair or wore it loose beneath an outrageous pointed hat, red shoes never covered her feet nor stripped stockings her legs. she ha no brook or mortar to fly about in. She did not walk with a cane or a stoop or point her fingers in a curse or scowl the Evil Eye at the village children. She did not cook in a cauldron or look for visions in the fire. She did not dance in the moonlight or keep a frog or a cat or a moth as a familiar.

No, she was a goof, church-going, god-loving woman who kept a home and hearth and a faithful wife. She was, in truth, plain and ordinary too look at. She neither laughed nor scowled: her smiles were cherished private affairs and her wrath was quick and quiet like the stomping insect pondering whether or not it wished to bite. Her only kin to strangeness was that she liked to read—and read she did to herself as well as him. Often, he heard the villagers gossiping and scowling that his mother “reads like a man drinks—too much and thinks it’s not enough.”

Her only betrayer was the two deep creases between her eyes where worry had drawn their plow—and the unusual tint to her brown eyes, how in certain lights and certain glows the color shifted a shade of red, as bright and glowing as rubies, embers of the fire, or two ripened berries in the heart of the summer, or two drops of freshly spilled blood flowing from a winter kill. Eyes with secrets long and far older than her years buried beneath the shadows of their depths.

And yet he knew her for a witch. _Knew,_ though she had never told him that secret. Knew though no one else in the village did. Had they did, they would’ve stormed the house and hanged her not the week prior but the winter of his tenth year just after his father died—for none was more suspicious than a woman alone, especially a widower.

They needed a scapegoat, he realized—their vacant little colony tucked away in ignorance of all the world’s evolutions was not to be some backward-looking place, they decided. Never mind that his mother had been a healer, a deliver and his father a cruel, faithless man. Never mind that she cast no spells or called no curses even when her husband’s fists fell upon her drunk and how she willingly took each beating and goaded him purposely if it would turn his mad, roving eye away from her son whom she taught all her knowledge and secrets.

Because nothing was worse than a lone woman with secrets.

They were not like man’s secrets, which were petty. His father’s secrets weren’t even secrets—they’d all seen the bruises he’d put on Svetlna Yurlov’s skin, the marks on their son’s arms. Knew he was taken to drink and drank heavily and knew he was a mean brute when he did. They _all_ knew he was cruel.

They _knew_ and they did nothing. Because men look after men. Women look after themselves.

They had no use for a witch’s boy.

He was no man in their eyes.

He clenched his fists in the dirt. Gritt his teeth to keep from uttering curses and wailing out his song again in a demand for vengeance.

The second noise was so clear and quiet it drowned out the first completely—the sound of wind in the pines and the rumble of dirt beneath. Words, the whirling whisper of wind in the reeds and the ancient groan of massive tree trunks, and they were everywhere—in the rustle of the leaves overhead, in the flutter of the grass between his fingers, rumbling in the soil cushioning his knees, and the tangling roots of his mother’s grave.

A voice he’d heard before in his dreams—huge. Ancient. Eternal.

Whispering in his ear the words that would haunt the entirety of his fate

The third sound cut through it and all others with a whirling crash of heavy stone against trees. The ground exploded before him as she lands, sending up a cloud of dust and dirt and debris. The giant mortar slams into the soft earth with the force of a bolder and sinks on a lopsided angle, the pestle clangs heavily against its side, ringing out with the force of its own sound.

The woman driving it stands above them all: not some frail, old, helpless lady but an iron-willed woman, wise in her age and imperious in her experience, whom mastered both life and death and held all its secrets in the unforgiving depths of her once red, now dark violet eyes. Her long hair, iron gray, pulled into an untidy plait down her back makes her look no less menacing. The wrinkles of her face and the long fingers of her gaunt hands give her face and form a ferocity that no woman of youth could ever have.

The villagers flee in terror of her—Baba Yaga, the Bone Mother. She who delivers the unborn and slows the hearts of the dying. She who stands alone in this world, knows all its secrets and who invokes both terror and reverence in ways worse than even those of the witch born.

She looks down at the child whose mournful song has summoned her. His cheeks are ashen and damp and anguish rims his eyes, but in them is the bright holly red color of hers in her youth. For the longest moment she stares at the child, saying nothing. Searching for traces of her own daughter in his youthful features.

He peers back at her with the same intent, recognition widens his witch red eyes as he meets the dark violet eyes of her, glowing like night pools. Set deep in the wrinkled face was the same proud eyes, upturned smile and sharp cheeked bones of his mother’s face—or his mother as she would’ve been had she’d been allowed to live to old age.

A smile cracks the withered visage. “Well, come Adrik.” Her voice is the grinding of stone against the earth.

He is taken off guard by the request. Not the command but the use of his name, for although she’d given it to him as a symbol for the darkness from which all true life is born, it had been so long since heheard himself referred to by it and not the childhood endearment instead.

“Well?” the old woman snapped, impatient.

“Forgive me,” he said suddenly nervous. “It had…been quite some time since someone addressed me by name.”

She arches a stony brow. “Has it now?”

He smiled inspire of himself. “Yes, Grandmother, it has.”

“And what did you mother call you?” she demands but not ungently.

“Yamaris,” he explains.

“Yamaris?” Her eyes widen, brighten first with surprise then with realization. She throws back her head in uproarious laughter—not a mad old hag’s cackle but a mother’s laugh: a laugh of pride and pain and grief and heartbreaking love. “Ah, my Myshka, my sweet, sweet girl.”

For the briefest moment he thought he saw the witch wipe a tear from the crusted wrinkle of her eye. “A true witch in the end.”

She leers back at the boy who is her grandchild. “Very well, then, Yami is what I will call you in name, and Adrik and Myshka I will call you in affection.”

“And what am I to call you, Baba Yaga?” His feet are rooted to the floor as he stares up at her tall, thin frame, her face a map of wrinkles, the heart the long hooked point of her nose, a surprisingly full mouth and night-dark eyes that glow with secrets and revelations both. And yet she seems less imperial as she ponders his question, offers her toothy smile.

“The world calls me Baba Yaga, and those too afraid to do so call me Bone Mother. You are neither, so you will call me Grandmother.” It was with this bold declaration that she once more offered him her gaunt hand.

This time he takes it, grateful for the addition of her strength as he hurls his grief-weakened body up the side of the smooth stone, struggles to pull his weight of the lip of the mortar. With a herculean effort, he manages to flop his front over the rim and, letting gravity do the rest, rolled inside. When he opened his eyes, a rush of shame and embarrassment blushes his cheeks pink. He caught her bemused expression as she peered down at him with the amused snort of a vulture overlooking scavengers on a carcass.

“You are my grandson, Adrik,” she began using his name in proof of her affection. “But that will do you no credit once we reach my house. I suggest you make yourself comfortable for my mortar is rough travel and I will not slow it for your convince.” She issued her orders, returning to her position at the pestle moved it like one would the runner of a boat. Yami stood beside her, his tired hands suddenly found their strength and he gripped the rim of the thick stone so hard his knuckles bleached white under the strain.

He swallowed a scream as the unruly stone took to the air a sudden plummet in reverse then stopped just as short and barreled through the cloud and the tops of the trees. There is a grinding sound as it obeys her commands and a swooping sweep, he realizes only when he looks back is the sweep of her massive room erasing her tracks—dust and magic mix together in a swirl, filling holes in the earth, restore branches and briar and removing all trace that a with and her grandson had ever been there.

The world beneath disappears in dizzying speeds, blending together earth, and ground and sky and trees like water thrown over a still drying oil painting. Only one thing remained in perfect pinpoint clarity: his eyes fell once more on the tree that marks his mother’s grave. Of the freshly churned earth of her mound and the sad, heavy bough that ended her life. Its crown of branches hands low and slumped like the long, disarrayed hair of a weeping woman, the trunk the arch of her spine, the curl of the fisted branches, her folded arms and cupped hands to catch her tears.

He wonders mournfully how long the tree will grieve.

How long it will blame itself for being her instrument of her murder.

He watches as it slowly disappears from sight and whispers one last goodbye to his mother, lets one last tear fall freely from his eye, and thinks for just a moment, her sees her smiling image in the dabbled outline of the leaves when the wind blows through the branches that will forever mark her grave.

And in the voice he hears once more, the voice: ancient, eternal, imperial.

Repeating the words she whispers in his dreams.

The promises.

A voice that is not his grandmother’s, though he hears that as well.

“In time I will teach how to control the mortar, how to master its strength and steer the pestle. Until then you will watch and you will learn. You will come to know many things in my care. I am not a merciful teacher but neither am I an uncaring one. If you are of an uncertain mind you will come to me and ask me, or I will assume you understand. And I will not be responsible if you do not and are either too proud or too cowardly to speak such.”

“Was my mother really your daughter?”

It was the one question she both knew and yet hoped he would never ask.

Yami did not look at her as he spoke, the curtain of his dark hair casting shadows over his teary-stained eyes and she saw the tiny droplets exploding upon his tight, fisted hands and knew the strength of their grip had nothing to do with the speed of her mortar. “She told me, taught me, many things, but she never told me about you? About what you can do? About…this.” He did not know how else to describe it and yet she knew exactly what he meant. “Why?”

He furiously wiped away his tears with a swipe of his arm and when he looked up at her his face was mad with confusion and grief. “I don’t understand it. What other secrets did she bury?”

His grandmother’s smile was a neutral line but her dark depths of her eyes swam with emotion, and in them Yami saw the rippling waves of the calm sea. “Sweet myshka, secrets can only be if they are buried and buried they must be—in the earth, in the trees, in a woman’s heart. It is the only place they are kept safe.”

Both disbelieving understanding and calm confusion wracked his face.

She calmed his nerves with a gaunt hand resting on his shoulder. “We are almost to my house. I will put on some tea and then I will tell you all my secrets and those of my daughter, though I imagine she has told you more than you realize.”

He wiped at his eyes again and nodded, grateful for the comfort, however small and strong.

That was how, on his sixteenth birthday, Adrik “Yami” Yurlov came into the care of his grandmother, Baba Yaga—The Bone Mother.

**Author's Note:**

> “Myshka”—lit. Little mouse, a Russian term of endearment as one may call a sweetheart or a dear child  
> Svetlana—lit. Luminescent in Russian  
> Adrik—Dark in Russian  
> Yamaris—hebrew for wished-for child, or star of the sea (used here as a term of endearment to explain Yami’s nickname)  
> Baba Yaga--Lit. Grandmother Witch  
> (I actually put a lot of thought into the Russian names)
> 
> Best thing about number of day challenges--the prompts don't HAVE to be in order....  
> Okay, that's a lie I totally cheated and skipped around cause I know between work and my recent obsession with Hazbin Hotel comics online I was NEVER gonna get the idea I originally had planned done in time...  
> This idea was originally supposed to be one full idea for the Trees prompt but once I started writing it the Buried prompt literally smacked me right in the face and I ran with it breaking the whole project into a three-part series that I plan to turn into an original short story featuring my all time favorite mythological character ever BABA YAGA!!!
> 
> This is how in the Walking House Yami came to become the New Baba Yaga, well, at least the first part


End file.
